Bitter With The Past But Sweet With The Dream Communism In The African American Imaginary

Download or read book 'Bitter with the Past but Sweet with the Dream': Communism in the African American Imaginary written by Cathy Bergin and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-05-19 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The legacy of the relationship between African American writers and Communism in the US is a contested one. Bergin argues that in three novels, by seminal mid-century authors (Wright, Himes and Ellison) Communism is not dismissed as incapable of meeting the demands of black political identity but is castigated for its refusal to do so. A detailed focus on the political milieu in which these texts operate challenges many of the presumptions about the ‘inability’ of Communism to comprehend racial oppression, which dominate literary critical approaches to these novels. She draws on the complex formations black political agency presumed and reproduced by American Communism during the Depression.